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Family Guy is arguably the funniest thing on TV, touching all the humour buttons from the top to the bottom of the humour register. It is clever, consistent and lacks all moral scruples. Unlike The Simpsons or South Park, the humour isn’t dulled by compassion or the attempt to make a wise point — it is just joke after joke after joke. Jokes which don’t tire because they are so accurate.
I only recently got into Family Guy, so Wringham kindly lent me the first six seasons on DVD to catch up. Dutifully, I started watching Season One last night after work, relieved to find it was virtually the same as the episodes I’d seen from Season Six (unlike the horrible early Simpsons episodes where Homer has a different voice). The episode are so short that I had managed to watch three episodes before I had even taken my shoes off, but I didn’t want to over do it, so busied myself with other jobs.
Strangely, I find it impossible to remember any Family Guy episode half an hour after watching. What does remain, however, is an underlying smarkaleckry, a snarkiness, that niggles inside the brain. After watching Family Guy, I can’t focus on anything without my unconscious Stewie Griffin making a snobbish aside. It is really quite annoying, so annoying in fact that I’m not sure I can bear to watch the rest.
27 Feb 2009
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I read Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art last night, a short sharp shock of a book that I urge you all to get. Pressfield is a novelist and screenwriter, best known for The Legend of Bagger Vance, which transposes the Bhagvad-Gita into the modern American golf novel. The War of Art is a self-help book that details strategies for overcoming Resistance, the all-encompassing fear that prevents people from fulfilling their potential or doing anything challenging.
Resistance is the voice in your head that tells you to tidy your desk rather than write. Resistance is the feeling of depression you get when you are slighted. Resistance is smoking, drinking, drug-taking, procrastination, television; anything that you use to defer or distract. Resistance takes on many guises, all of which Pressfield describes with the passionate intensity of a man who battles them on a daily basis.
The book is split into three parts. The first describes the enemy, the second presents strategies to defeat the enemy, and the third offers advice on how to seduce the muses into providing you with inspiration. The key tip is to be humble, to be a craftsman absorbed in their own work rather than worried about what others think, to be present every day and to put in your hours rather than waiting for inspiration to strike.
The War of Art is a really good self-help book, one of few such books that forces you to confront yourself. So many times I have given into Resistance and rationalized my life away; Pressfield’s book is an armoury full of weapons to swat away these snickering little demons
26 Feb 2009
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I accidentally posted yesterday’s entry prematurely, revealing in the process that these blog entries are often written in advance. At first I did this when we had people to stay or went away for the weekend to ensure continuity and achieve my goal of posting once per day for an entire year, but gradually I have come to do it all the time, as a way of giving myself a break and preventing the condition that I know as blogthinking.
Blogthinking is where you can’t experience any event or activity without hearing it as a blog post. It can happen anywhere at anytime. You’ll be investigating a possible leak under your sink and then you’ll hear your writing voice saying “I was doing plumbing this weekend and started thinking about the hydraulic theory of the mind.” You’ll be cleaning the windows, listening to an Open Court podcast about the prisoner’s dilemma in Quentin Tarantino films, when you start blogthinking about “how it’s interesting how we procrastinate about these tasks of for weeks, even though they only take about twenty minutes.” It’s not so much the thought that is any different to a normal thought, rather it is the expectation of an audience that makes it such a terrible indulgence.
A few years ago I wrote a satirical story about reality TV in which individuals could be recorded constantly by a personal POV camera that could be mixed with other POVs and CCTV in order to create a film of your own life. I imagined that people would become obsessed about making their own lives dramatic and interesting, so that they could watch it when they got home. At the time, I assumed that such a life would be sterile and mechanical, lacking authenticity. Now I realise that it is essentially the same as blogthinking, except you have to write it up rather than just watch it on TV.
So what is the solution? Stop blogging? Blog about very specific things rather than all of human life? Write a private diary? I don’t know but if I start hearing that voice again I am going to set the hounds on it.
25 Feb 2009
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Thoughts of death quicken the pulse. Today we are here: seeing colours, thinking thoughts, kissing girls. Tomorrow we are gone and there is nothing. In between there a lot of futility. Imagine being on your death bed: what do you regret not doing? What do you wish you hadn’t wasted done?
I can’t decide whether Jade Goody is lucky or unlucky to know that she is going to die. She can settle accounts, be with the people she loves, reflect on what life meant, put plans together for her children’s welfare, and leave the world on good terms. On the other hand, she knows that she is going to die which rather puts a dampener on the time she has left.
What if there were a text message service that told you several times a day “you are going to die soon, stop wasting time” — would we become inured to it? Would I still have watched the laughably misjudged teen spy thriller Stormbreaker? Would I have watched the cynical superhero/rom-com crossover My Super Ex-Girlfriend? Would I have spent thirty minutes clicking around Seety.co.uk, being mildly impressed to see that the room I lived in when I first moved to London is available for all to see? Would I have spent three minutes on this site working out my life expectancy? I don’t know. Probably not. But what would I have done instead? Ah, that is the question.
24 Feb 2009
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Another thing that I discovered from reading Enough is that the more you learn to appreciate the good things in life, the happier and more contented you are. John Naish drew my attention to a webdesigner whose blog, Three Beautiful Things, consists of noting down things that make the world a better place. So far, so cloying. But I have to admit that whenever I have seen the opposite practice, where people’s cynicism and depression makes everything they touch turn to shit, it certainly seems to make people unnecessarily unhappy.
Anyway, as a kind of experiment, I decided to make a daily list of three things that I feel grateful for. This was a lot more difficult that it sounds. For a start, you feel obliged to be specific about what you appreciate. On Tuesday I noted down “the use of Albertus typeface on Glasgow Green”, which gives me pleasure whenever I see it, but sounds dissatisfying written down. Otherwise, the things that I appreciate tend to be rather vague like “the sense of order I feel after doing a weekly review.”
Here are some other things that I felt a bit grateful for:
- the strained, exhausted feeling you get from detoxing from caffeine
- having a relatively simple life
- the restriction in constructivist design to use only squares, circles, and triangles
- that Laura is well and enjoying New York
- DH Lawrence’s denunciation of the bourgeois in poetry
- being able to walk to work
- not being addicted to email
Unfortunately, seeing them written down stops finding pleasure in them. They are things that gave pleasure in the moment, not in the abstract. So from now on I think I’ll keep them there.
23 Feb 2009
blog The bachelor life doesn’t suit me; I much prefer the symbiotic, task-sharing, uxorious joys of coupledom. Perhaps I need a few days to get used to Laura’s absence, but so far it has been awful. I knew I was in trouble when I decided to have steamed broccoli, mushrooms, a fried egg, and tinned mackerel for dinner. It wasn’t dinner so much as a random selection of incompatible food.
Rather than share laughter over Come Dine With Me, as I would have done normally, I watched The Short Films of David Lynch, which are the cinematic equivalent of being in a Francis Bacon painting. My sleeping was also disturbed as I become wrapped in the duvet like a sweaty caterpillar in its chrysalid. Even time goes quicker when you haven’t got another person there to share it with (maybe because subjective time goes quicker than time bounced off someone else?).
As an experiment to occupy my mind, I decided to drink only water for a few days. The immediate effect of this was to give me a slight headache from caffeine withdrawal (I only usually drink a few mugs of green tea), but I now have a woozy sense of relaxation. Ironically, I had been extolling the virtues of a strong coffee to Will on Wednesday night, but after reading this article I am not so sure.
22 Feb 2009
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One of my worst habits when walking is to use shortcuts even when there is a perfectly serviceable path. I save perhaps 5 seconds each time and sometimes wonder if it is really worth it.
When I get home, I traipse dirt across the floors, so get nagged by the wife; my trousers are flecked with mud, meaning I have to clean them more often; and, I have the knowledge that if everyone used the shortcut the grass would turn into a bog. My only excuse — which isn’t even an excuse — is that I may have been a Roman in a previous life and can’t abide winding roads.
There are some benefits, though. To stop my shoes getting muddy, I bought a cheap and sturdy pair of Reeboks which allow me to have a pair of soft leather shoes waiting for me near the heater at work. The latter are so comfortable that they are more like slippers than shoes. I would never have known such pleasures without the shortcut.
One area in which I never take shortcuts is when I read books. Practices like speed-reading seem like a false economy. A few weeks after accusing poetry of being in a permanently vegetative state, I now find myself reading it on a daily basis. The real breakthrough came when Laura and I started reading out loud to each other. When you read out loud the words become substantial and the rhythm allows the thoughts and images to flourish in your mind. My current favourite is DH Lawrence, for his figs, his snap-dragons, and his denunciations of the bourgeoisie. Last week I saw Seven Ages of Love on Channel Four, a stylish presentation of Luke Wright‘s poems inspired by the stories of people in love, from teenagers to nonagenarians. It was the best thing I’ve seen on TV for ages.
21 Feb 2009
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Apparently the tolerance phenomena I mentioned the other day has a proper psycho-sociological term. It’s called the Hawthorne Effect and is named after a study of an American factory where it was discovered that no matter what change was made by consultants (more light, less light, various reward schemes), productivity levels always went up before returning to ‘normal’ levels after a few weeks. It wasn’t that the changes were especially effective or ineffective, rather it was the change plus the belief that the change would have a markedly positive effect that made the difference. This explains why I felt great after a couple of juices and sublime after only checking my email once per day — I believed it would work and thus it did.
I read about the Hawthorne Effect in John Naish’s enjoyable book Enough. He argues that rather than perpetuating the cycle of continual novelty in the hope of a short-term boosts we should push through the dip. He uses the examples of meditation and yoga, which both begin as revelations but soon become chores; we should push on through that dip until they become . . . well, he doesn’t explain what they become after they are chores, but presumably it is something good.
There was another book published recently called Enough by the environmentalist Bill McKibben, which argued that we should stop the upcoming genetic arms race between parents (where no cognitive or physical enhancement will ever be enough) and avoid the limitless post-human future envisioned by Ray Kurzweil. Unless we do so, we won’t enjoy running anymore (McKibben goes on a lot about his running). For John Naish (who goes on about meditation and not having a TV or a mobile), Enough means evolving a new human that no longer desires more and more stuff, in order that the Earth from becoming a denuded husk. Both books interpose the figure of the author in that cutesy (and quite unnecessary) modern way.
Ultimately, Naish’s Enough is a call for mindfulness: not watching TV whilst eating, not straying to shopping sites every time you go on the internet, and definitely not buying more useless gadgets (he has set-up a prize for the worst one). Unfortunately, we seem to be hardwired to buy more stuff: if you were a hoarder of food in the Pleistocene era you had more chance of survival than the equivalent of the declutterer or life laundrist. The elephant in the room is the capitalist dilemma: what would happen if people decided enough was enough and the economy stopped growing? Would we go back to the dark ages?
20 Feb 2009
blog I burnt my finger last night after touching a dead lightbulb. I assumed it hadn’t been working for a while and so got a nasty shock when I touched it and my finger tip was fried. At the moment of realisation, I recalled the same thing happening a few years previously — the gap between incidents being too long to develop any kind of mindfulness.
It feels numb now. I am typing and clicking with it, each time it presses against the plastic I feel a dull throb. A hardened carapace protecting a zone of pain. If it hadn’t been my index finger, I would have been sure that it would develop into a blister. But this index finger is, in comparison with the rest of my body, a hardened world traveller. It has seen things my elbows wouldn’t believe — my knees would be shocked, and my long-suffering shoulders would probably start a campaign to have it severed from my hand. The index finger on my right hand is my go to appendage, my trusty friend, the most reliable tool in the shed.
Last night I watched The Last Woman on Earth (1960), an early Roger Corman film that I had put on my Lovefilm list about six months ago, when I was obsessed with the post-apocalyptic genre.
The premise is that everyone in the world is killed by the temporary absence of oxygen apart from three people — a traditional businessman (Harold), his disenchanted wife (Ev), and his dull lawyer (Martin) — who are scuba diving at the time. The film documents the tension that builds as they try to cope with life in a world without society, where possessions and social ties are meaningless, much of which previews the breakdown in societal relations that was to take place in the in the Sixties and Seventies.
Harold tells them to take things as they come, to do things step-by-step. He is depicted in the pre-apocalyptic times as a workaholic and believes that the need to work is inborn and will be the only thing that will save their sanity.
Evelyn sees an opportunity to get out of the prison of bourgeois domesticity to find out where she belongs and who she is.
For Martin, the end of the world means a collapse of all values. He becomes a nihilist, pointing out that nothing belongs to anyone when there is no societal superego to keep everyone in check. Not that he actually does anything particularly nihilistic (although it is suggested that he might be a necrophiliac). When asked what he believes in, he says: “Nothing Ev, I’m too civilized.”
I am glad that I kept it on my Lovefilm list even if I’m no longer obsessed with the end of the world as we know it. Nowadays, if I see a portent or a step towards the end (further devaluing paper money, the stoking of Middle East tensions, even more debasing reality TV), I anxiously imagine the end, I just nod and carry on. Even if the end did come, I think I would treat it like I treat this burn to my index finger or watching The Last Woman on Earth — an opportunity for new sensations.
19 Feb 2009
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A telling comparison: Laura has gone to New York for a week in order to speak at an exhibition about Seduction, whereas I am in Glasgow writing emails to local politicians. I think it is clear who has the better deal. For Valentine’s we had a game of scrabble whilst listening to Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads, which is being repeated on Radio 7. My favourite, possibly because I identify with her, is the one with Patricia Routledge, about a busybody who is always writing letters.
My current email is about the continuing degradation of the local area by the skeleton-faced hedonists who congregate around the Salvation Army hostel. Now, I have nothing against teetotal Christian organisations who take in drug addicts when they are released from prison, but I do wish that their modus operandi included cleaning up after their charges. Every morning I see the cleaner washing down the pavement outside the hostel, but he never bothers with the pavement on the other side of Clyde Street. Nor is any effort made to clean the patch of land between the river and street, which is a mess of empty cider and wine bottles. Every evening I see the scrawny, skeleton-faced hedonists chatting gaily, half-cut, and anticipating the oblivion ahead.
In The Soul of Man Under Socialism, Oscar Wilde suggests that the real enemy of reform are the virtuous working classes, those who accept their sorry lot and work hard in degrading jobs. The working class who steal and debauch are heroically spurning the current inequitable system. Wilde proposes that all property be held in common, that no man should accumulate more materials and wealth than he actually needs, and that we should get criminals and machines to do menial work so that everyone else can dedicate themselves to creating and appreciating works of beauty. Every time I walk past the Salvation Army hostel I think about these ideas, I wonder whether the skeleton-faced underclass of Glasgow could be saved by political reform or would they just squander their new found riches on even more dispiriting pleasures?
18 Feb 2009